Profiles

The Dirtiest Player

Continued (page 6 of 7)

But the prosecutors saw the case differently. They had been burned before by witnesses who changed their stories between the interview and the trial. (Their last big case against a Philly athlete, a 2002 gun charge involving Allen Iverson, blew up when a key witness recanted his story.) During "balls-out fuckin' arguments" with cops, the Philly prosecutors fixated on the criminal records of the witnesses and slight discrepancies in their statements. They thought it would be hard to win the case on the backs of such blatant pieces of shit.

Piece of shit is a versatile bit of law-enforcement slang. It can mean something as specific as "hustler with a record" or it can mean something rounder, like "person who won't cooperate with us" or "person who lied to us" or "person who will not be trusted by a jury." All of the witnesses, for various reasons, could be grouped under this same heading. Nixon was a piece of shit. Pop was a piece of shit. The father of the wounded boy was a piece of shit. McCray was a piece of shit, albeit an intelligent piece of shit, because he never signed a statement. And Harrison, although he had no record, was a piece of shit, too. The prosecutors and cops were in agreement on the piece-of-shit front; the only difference was that the cops believed that there were degrees, with Robert Nixon being what one of them called "the least piece of shit."

The cops also thought it was wrong to drop the case just because a piece-of-shit famous person might be guilty of shooting a piece-of-shit unfamous person in a piece-of-shit part of the city. If prosecutors required every witness to have a pristine record, one detective says, "most of the cases in the city wouldn't be solved." None of the cops doubted for a second that if Harrison was a plumber or a UPS driver instead of a famous athlete, he'd have long since been arrested. "Everybody has their career-anticipation light on with this," says veteran Philadelphia detective Michael Chitwood, now a police chief in Florida. " 'If I go forward with this and this guy's found not guilty, I may not get promoted'... and I just think that's wrong."

In the end, though, it wasn't the cops' call. It was Lynne Abraham's. After investigating the Harrison case for more than eight months, the veteran Philly D.A. called a press conference on January 6, 2009. A diminutive woman with frosty white hair, Abraham has built her career on making life miserable for "punks with guns." Toughness is her brand. But at her press conference, at which no detectives were present, she spent much of her time impugning the credibility of the witnesses who had cooperated (Nixon, Dixon) and lamenting the ones who had not (the father of the 2-year-old boy, who never spoke to police; anyone else who may have seen the broad-daylight shooting). The case would not be going forward, Abraham said, due to "multiple, mutually exclusive, inherently untrustworthy, and sometimes false statements by the people present." (Abraham declined to be interviewed for this story.)

As for Nixon, he was back on the street. The D.A. had apparently forgotten to pay his hotel bill after a month, so he wandered off.

*****

"i'm gonna get Lynne Abraham if it kills me." This is Pop's mother, Pearl Bronson, a middle-aged woman wearing gray Nikes and her braided hair back in a bun. "I truly believe that because Lynne Abraham did not arrest that son of a bitch, my son is dead," she tells me, eyes aflame. "Just like she pulled the trigger herself."

On January 28, three weeks after Abraham's press conference, one of her deputies prosecuted Pop for making a false report to the police. It was surreal, carnivalesque—like when Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face and the friend apologized for getting in the way of Cheney's bullet. The judge imposed six months' probation. Pop was already on probation for another case, and the conviction meant he had to go to jail; he was briefly handcuffed, then immediately released pending appeal.

Before that day, Pop seemed willing to let the system give him some measure of justice. He was suing Harrison in civil court for damages. Pearl overheard him one night talking on the phone; he mentioned Harrison's name, then said, "I'm gonna let it go, let my lawyer take care of it." But to be shot and prosecuted? Especially while Harrison walked the city a free man and the street was abuzz about how Pop had been punked? They were laughing at him. He told a friend, "He's not gonna run me out of my neighborhood."

Pop made it a point to eat breakfast every day at the Chopstick & Fork, a diner on 28th and Girard, half a block from Playmakers. Pop didn't live anywhere near the Chopstick & Fork. Even to sit down over some eggs and pancakes was an act of defiance.

On July 21, 2009, according to surveillance video captured from a nearby convenience store, Pop emerged from the Chopstick & Fork and walked to his car. He looked over his shoulder, then got into his car and made a phone call. Three minutes later, a six-foot-tall man in a black hoodie and white sneakers ran up to the driver's side and shot Pop multiple times through the window. Then the man sprinted around the hood to the passenger side and shot Pop again. The shooter fled.

Pop spent the next two months in Hahnemann Hospital, a tracheostomy tube jammed into his windpipe, able to communicate with his family only by blinking. He died on September 4, 2009.

According to multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation, the primary suspect in Pop's murder was initially Lonnie Harrison, Marvin's cousin. Acting on a tip, police searched Lonnie's apartment, looking for a gun. The apartment was a tiny room above Deborah's Kitchen, the soul-food restaurant on Girard run by Marvin's mother and aunt. But Lonnie hadn't been living there for a year. There was no gun or any other evidence to tie him to the murder, and no witnesses have ever come forward to identify Lonnie or anyone else as the shooter. On the convenience-store video, the shooter's face was obscured by shadow, making a positive identification impossible.